Threediopolis

by Andrew Schultz profile

Science Fiction
2013

Go to the game's main page

Member Reviews

Number of Reviews: 6
Write a review


4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
Neat concept, but gets somewhat tedious towards the end, October 19, 2013

This game is about wordplay, and it's mostly about figuring this particular puzzle out in a systematic manner (almost no objects to interact with, which in this case is fine).
You are given a list of tasks to accomplish, and each of them implies figuring out a specific command related to the constraint at play here. You can figure out about half of them fairly easily, then you realize that you missed a few more; you then get somewhat stuck, but luckily you can use the room numbers to try to get more information about the rest of the commands (very wise from the author to have included those, the game would be simply too hard without them). And then, there's the last lousy ones, including obscure ones (also, it's not very clear that you can combine two words, so you can get stuck on the longer words for a while if you don't realize that).

Apart from those commands, there's a few more that generate a (usually funny) response from the game - which is an interesting design choice (it could have been than any valid command would give you a point, but it's not; although I feel some of those "extra" commands could have been on the task list, which could have bumped the tedious ones off the list and made the game less frustrating). But yay for Big Lebowski references.

The writing was actually somewhat underwhelming, I found. Responses to valid commands rarely go for longer than one line, which doesn't really make it that rewarding. (I know writing 45 different responses is soul-crushing, but here I feel it's a necessary evil!!) The end message (for completing the task list) is incredibly underwhelming too. ((Spoiler - click to show)We spend hours running around, putting things in a quantum shoebox to prepare a mysterious party, please tell us how the party went, if the boss was pleased, how we managed to fill the room with the box's contents, anything!). I did notice a few typos, and a non-critical bug, but nothing more.

To sum up, it's almost all about that wordplay puzzle, which is fun and challenging, making the experience enjoyable but a little rough.

Was this review helpful to you?   Yes   No   Remove vote  
More Options

 | Add a comment 

Comments on this review

Previous | << 1 >> | Next

Andrew Schultz, November 18, 2013 - Reply
Thanks! I've tried to update these shortcomings with some stuff post-IFComp. I divided the tasks into types but don't really have Ed's reactions--yet. There's still more to go. If there's anything specific, you can enter something in the issue repository & I'd be grateful for the help. I have blind spots a lot.

https://bitbucket.org/andrewschultz/threediopolis/issues?status=new&status=open
Previous | << 1 >> | Next